Dreaming: What is the Source of Illumination in dreams?
I’ve spent my entire life in a state of fascination about the nature of dreaming… from the first time I realized that my parents couldn’t explain or understand the experiences I sometimes related to them… to the events so shocking they caused me to re-evaluate the fundamental nature of my mind, body and soul (if we choose to speak of such things as distinct, which is a dubious option, however common it may be).
And I have a variety of questions about dreaming that I am essentially married to. These are questions that are infinitely deep, and so you never really get answers… you get perspectives, ideas, figures… theories… and direct experiences. I’m not looking for the divorce that ‘an answer’ would comprise. The depth of the subject is infinite. So what I am after is insight… progress.
Maybe the detective’s analog of … well, you can guess what I am suggesting.
And my adventures have been rewarding. I have learned things from paying close attention to dreaming that I suspect would have been otherwise impossible, and when I listen to other people report their dreams, I feel a thrill and see evidence of patterns and meaning that will almost certainly escape both the amateur and the professional.
And that’s the kind of thing I am after.
Now, before I begin, dreaming… like love or wealth or relationships in general… this word doesn’t refer to a single phenomena, except when we use it as a rather crude generalization. Yes, all such phenomena can be relegated to the category of dreaming. Doesn’t mean it’s a wise idea. And even if we make this decision, we should be ready to understand that the range of related experiences and phenomena are vast.
I long ago realized that some experiences were reasonably thought of as dreams, while others had special features, qualities or results… that were radically different from the ‘ordinary’ everynight dreams. Some of these experiences were powerful dreams that stood out from all others. Mountains in the valleys of my dreaming.
But there were other experiences that were not like ordinary dreams much at all. Some didn’t have plots. Or were simply disembodied experiences of bizarre lights, noises, situations or even ‘entities’. Such experiences comprise the range of relatively exotic experiences associated with both hypnagogia (the ‘between’ of waking and sleep) and hypnopompia (the ‘between’ of sleeping and waking).
Anyone with experience of this knows what I mean when I say that such experiences incline us to question our ordinary beliefs about life, the universe… and everything.
By listening to people speak about their dreaming experiences, as well as hearing hundreds of reports of dreams (and recording, in so much as this is possible, my own dreams) I have learned perspectives that prove uncanny in their ability to grant useful insight… or illuminate the matter of dreaming in general, and non-ordinary dreamlike situations as well. And while I have many models or ‘toys’ I like to use to think about dreaming, I want, today, to talk about an exchange I had earlier in the day with a middle-aged British woman who was recounting to me an experience she had repeatedly from the age of around 7 until about 11. We had a relatively limited time in which to speak… but she shared and we spoke about a range of topics that I trust anyone even vaguely interested in the topic will find edifying.
[ Begin Transcript of a Conversation ]
D: So, previously, you told me the story of this kind of dream you would have repeatedly when you were young, and I’d like to share it with my readers (with your permission). So, now that we’re recording, feel free to describe the experience as you remember it.
H: So, we lived in this two-story house, in (place in Britain), and I lived there with my Mom and Stepdad. The bedrooms were upstairs. And I, I had a bunk bed that I slept on the top of. And the dream would always begin the same way. I would wake up in the middle of the night, in the dark. Now, when this happened, I would often get up to get a book, and read for a while, to comfort myself. This was what I liked to do. So I would reach over to turn on the little bedside light next to my bed, but it wouldn’t go on…
D: Classic! That’s totally perfect! (laughing)
H: Oh, it is? I am so glad! (Smiling) You mean…
D: Nodding. Yes, yes, this is really perfect. (smiling)
H: See, what I would do when I woke up in the middle of the night, is, I would turn on the light, and go and get one of my books, and read it. So I would wake up, and turn on the light… but nothing would happen.
D: Right
H: And then I would know, that was the signal… and I would feel it. Then I would know that this was one of those situations again. That I was in this situation again.
And I want to explain that my senses were completely alive with … everything… just like I was actually awake in my room. I could feel my nightdress, and the cold air… and the solidity of objects… everything was so real. But the light not going on was the signal that… well, that this strange thing was happening to me again. When I got down from my bunk bed, it was colder, because it was cold there. I could feel the cold.
And, because I was scared, I would carefully depart my room, and go down the hall … and I was so scared that I didn’t knock… I just went right into my parents’ room.
But not only were they not there. The bed was completely made. So it was … I don’t know… it was obvious that they were never there in the first place. And that was even more frightening. It was like… there was no one else … anywhere.
But then I heard the sounds.
D: Nodding, smiling in recognition.
H: I would hear the noises. At first, outside. I could hear them. Like a bunch of things moving and their footsteps, sort of. But not one or two. A swarm. Something was seething, like. And I would hear them come into the downstairs and I was really afraid.
I mean, there were places I could hide. Closets or other places. And I would go around trying places to hide. And it became, in that part of the dream… it was about hiding. It was a hiding dream.
But eventually, you know, I would realize they were coming up the stairs. And that was too terrifying… so I would go back to my room. Because, at least there, well, there were my books, and my bed. My things. The things I surrounded myself with. Familiar things. So I would go back to my room, and I would scrunch down under the bottom bunk. With my knees tucked up a little. And I could feel the carpet and it was cold…
D: Which side were you on?
H: (examining her sides) The right. And I was facing the wall. It just… I didn’t want to see what was coming. I could hear them…
D: And so, the pillows… they were above your head, correct? Or were they above your feet?
H: My head.
D: Right. Your right side.
H: Yes. And so I would just wait there. I knew they were coming, but I couldn’t do anything. I was just hiding. But I would always hear them as they eventually got close. And I would know when they were just about to find me, as if one of them (unclear word) the bed and then…
…then this thing would happen. Where it was like a single finger. I would feel it touch my spine at the base of my neck, and then very slowly, very deliberately, it would trace down my back along my spine until it got to my tailbone… and then I would wake up. Right then. I want to be really clear, it wasn’t vicious, it didn’t scratch me or injure me, it just ran very continually a finger down my spine that way. And I would wake up when it reached the last bone.
D: Amazing. It’s so fascinating, I mean, there are features here that are beautiful and exemplary of things I have both experienced and wondered about. So firstly, I have heard many stories that resemble the first part of your experience. I have heard many people describe a situation where they awaken in the room they are actually dreaming in (this is generally referred to as false awakening), and get up, and attempt to turn on a light… fail… then then undergo something either very bizarre, or frightening. I think most of the people who I heard this from were women, but I have also heard a few similar stories from men and had some surprising experiences of my own with this.
H: (noding, smiling, looking surprised and excited) Really?!
D: Absolutely. In fact, I’d say this is a relatively common report, at least that part of the experience, where… you know, you’re in your room, you wake up, and try to turn a light on and nothing happens.
So you’re not alone, there are probably millions of people who have a similar experience, but as I often point out… the general likeness of this experience to other reports I have heard isn’t what we want to focus on… it’s the features that are unique, or the unique way some familiar tropes are expressed in your experience that are, I think, really important. The running of the finger down your spine though, I would love to find out if other people have experienced something similar or it’s familiar to them.
H: Oh me too! Me too! I mean, that experience, it’s so intense… just the way they’d trace right down my back that way, and then I’d wake up.
D: Exactly, that’s really fascinating. I would love to hear a few reports from others with something to add to that, because it would grant me some insight into ways to understand that feature… whereas right now, having just heard it for the first time, I am not sure where to go with it.
Alright, so first of all, it occurs to me that (and sure, there are exceptions, perhaps) when you have a dream that where you dream that you are in the room you are dreaming in, or that you are getting out of the bed you are actually sleeping in this is one of the ways I would distinguish this kind of experience from other ordinary dreams…
H: Oh! Right, I see. You were talking earlier about recognizing different ‘types’ of dreaming experience…
D: Yes, because we have these words like ‘dream’ or ‘love’ or even ‘human’ — and we’re so poorly trained in understanding how language actually works, that we just suppose that anything that happens while you’re asleep is a dream. This isn’t entirely wrong but it’s confused, because it’s both useful and important to make intelligent distinctions in the continuum of dream phenomenon… just as it is with love or human beings.
This is a great example of a specific form of dream experience. You awaken in the room you’re sleeping in, usually in the bed you’re sleeping in… and this usually portends some kind of at least modestly hypnopompic experience.
H: I see, exactly. This is one of the distinctions we can make in different kinds of dreaming…
D: Exactly. For some reason… well, I’ll get to that in a moment… and here we have an example of a specific form of dream experience, one that’s useful to distinguish, that usually can be thought of as hypnopompic — that is to say — that your consciousness is ‘on the way to awakening’, but in an interim state — a state that, ‘ordinarily’ you’d have no actual experience or memory of.
This is an experience where your consciousness is in an unusual situation of awareness of and relation to its own processes. It is essentially experiencing the processes involved in producing sensory experience in dreaming… and these intrude upon the dreaming manifold with unexpected intensity, effects, and potencies. (Note: this is a form of psychosensory feedback, and something like this often occurs under the influence of psychedelic drugs. One might even argue that the primary feature of such intoxications is catalysis of various simultaneous forms of feedback.)
H: Wow! I get it!
D: In that particular situation, various unusual things happen, and one of them… that never occurred to me until just now… ( I realize that the ‘strange force’ sometimes encountered in these dreams is a kind of feedback of the dreaming mind’s intrusion into its own formative activities… into the sensorial whirpool from which specifically distinguishable elements and identities emerge to awareness in the experience of the dreamer. )
H: Smiling, nodding.
D: So let me describe a similar experience of my own. As an adult. And by the way, when I was a child, I had a repeating dream of my own, that… an invisible monster was coming… and the adults couldn’t detect it.
H: Nods. Looks surprised.
D: Which made things terribly wrong. And if it got anywhere near me, I lost the ability to make noises with my throat…
H: Me too, I mean, in my dream… I couldn’t…
D: Yes… the throat becomes caught. I’d wake up with this kind of strangled scream trapped in my throat… a sort of gurgling squeal that was deeply weird.
H: Noding, smiling in recognition. Yes, I wasn’t able to make any sound at all, no squealing… just a feeling of something … stuck there. A stuckness. Impossible to make a vocal sound.
D: And eventually what happened with that was that … and I think, many of these dreams were ones in which the monster came for me in my bed… I’m not sure. But eventually what happened was that I had a dream that my parents had another couple over ‘to play cards’ (though I do not remember this ever happening), and that couple brought with them a small pack of doberman pinschers
H: Wow.
D: I was away from the house in a nearby park, in the sandbox, when the invisible monster showed up in the dream. I always sensed, somehow, that it was near and hunting me… coming… to get me.
H: Nodding familiarly.
D: This time, however, when it got near enough to be … a real threat, I began to make the strangled screaming sound. Of course, I realized, no one would hear me, as usual…
H: Nodding, smiling.
D: But the doberman pinschers heard the high-pitched sound, from a block away, and ripped down the fence in my backyard, and rushed to where I was screaming from… and destroyed the invisible monster. And, to my knowledge, I never had that dream again… Now of course, when I was a child, and I am not sure if this happened before or after… I had seen the film Fantastic Planet… and in this film there is an invisible monster… that makes… a footprint (hand gestures) in the sand, and then… another footprint… (hand gestures)…
H: Smiling, nodding, grins.
D: The invisible monster is coming… you can see its footprint. Maybe I had seen this, maybe not. In any case, when the monster came… in the dream… I was paralyzed. But the dogs destroyed.
H: I remember, in my own experience, trying sometimes to scream… but no matter what I did… there wasn’t any sound at all. I would try with all my might to scream… but nothing, nothing came out. Nothing.
D: Yes, Yes!
There’s so many things we can talk about, but since we don’t have infinite time, I am going to try to focus on a few of the important aspects we can get at relatively quickly.
H: Nods
D: So, I have this friend who is a Neuroscientist (Dr. Kevin Boru), and he’s… at once a genius, in his way, and a total pain in the ass. He essentially refuses to talk about dreams, because, he claims, that people want to use them to support claims about metaphysics and interpretation… but he has a couple of other peeves and observations about dreaming that are as peculiar as they are compelling. And one of the things he says is that ‘I don’t think we’re using language in dreaming. Ever.’
H: Mouth opens in surprise. (slow) Wow… (starts to take notes)
D: And, at first, I totally disagreed. I just thought, you know, different people have different experiences. And think different things about them. But over time, as I learned to pay attention, I began to think that maybe what we’re experiencing in dreams isn’t language. I mean, you think you’re having conversations and things, and you said things, and I said things… and they said things… but, firstly, all the things we experience in dreams are generally different from their waking-world resemblances. We should realize this. A book in a dream isn’t a book. Light in a dream isn’t light. Walking isn’t walking. Seeing isn’t seeing. These are all the dream-state instances of similar waking-world experiences. And I want us to take that very seriously.
But there’s another problem, which is more what I think Kevin was on about. He’s saying, look, this dreaming thing is really emerging from Right Hemisphere activation/dominance. And language is pretty much anathema to the Right Hemisphere. It doesn’t make it, or use it, or need it. Oh, it might be able to get a word out, an exclamation, for example. But, in general, it doesn’t use (or need) language. Its ways of relating are different… nonordinary… perhaps almost telepathic (though Kevin didn’t suggest that). So Kevin said that he thinks we nearly never use language in a dream. And over time I wasn’t totally convinced, but I came to suspect that he was mostly correct. And what is happening is something we do not have a waking-world idea of.
I mean, I think part of what is happening is … this new idea I’ve had… that relates to what dreams do to create these experiences… I’ll use the word partial disambiguation. This is a process that begins with… imagine a sort of cloud-like collection of noise in the form of visual and cognitive-emotional activity… and you just sort of start collapsing that… allowing it to congeal, if you will, into a variety of phenomenon that become slightly more distinct and distinguishable as you continue to the process…
H: Oh!
D: … until they finally begin to resemble objects, persons, situations, behaviors, relationships, threats, opportunities … and so on… that we are familiar with from waking life. But you never continue this process until you get all the way to specific identities and objects, etc. In fact, the dreaming mind both thrives upon and prefers ambiguity. If it was active in waking life… it would be investing our waking experience with ambiguity rather than, as our waking mind does, disambiguating all the way down to concrete identities.
H: Yes!
D: Our dreaming experience is rich with meaningful domains of ambiguity that would drive our waking minds insane… or so they are inclined to think. What’s actually going on is more complex, I think. When ambiguity starts creeping in while we are awake, if our experience undergoes what I’d call reambiguation then the waking mind starts freaking out. That’s usually the opposite of its favorite game.
NOTE: The exception is what we refer to as ‘play’ in children. Play is actually an intentional experience of the purposeful re-introduction of meaningful ambiguity into relationships, activities, roles, identities and situations… for the dual-purposes of entertainment and learning.
H: Listening
D: And that’s part of why everyone is freaking out right now because there’s a bunch of ambiguity, right?
H: Absolutely! Yes, so much!
D: In places where there’s never ambiguity.
H: Exactly.
D: I mean, (raising voice volume for emphasis) if I go to the store then I buy things…
H: Laughing
D: What is this… (raising voice) maybe there will be things… and maybe not?!
H: Nodding, laughing
D: I mean, that’s too bloody ambiguous for me!
H: Laughing.
D: What are you talking about? Maybe I will have a job… but maybe not?
H: Exactly. Too many unknowns, so many maybes…
D: Maybe I will get sick, but maybe not?! Maybe it will kill me … but maybe I won’t even know I am sick?! What the flap is this? That’s just too much ambiguity for waking-world humans to deal with…
H: (hand cuts horizontal) Across the board…
D: Yes! In every [redacted] dimension of our lives…
H: In ever dimension. (Nods)
D: I mean, one of the ways to think about this is that… features of the … well, the waking mind is normally dominating our waking experience (holds right hand cupped above cupped left hand) and now (starts to flip them over) features of our dreaming mind… are leaking into waking experience…
H: Nodding. Exactly.
D: And the waking mind is freaking out and like, trying … it’s like “Make it stop! I don’t want to have that adventure….”
H: Laughing ironically, nodding.
D: “I’ll go ahead and take the psychedelic drug or whatever and go there for 6 hours, but that comes to an end! I am not bloody going there to stay, what are you thinking?!”
H: Totally cracking up.
D: You know? So, I’ll tell a little story. I wake up in my room. And I go to turn on the main light. I never use that light, by the way, but every time this has happened, that’s what happens first. So I try to turn on the light, and nothing happens. And I exit my room, and go into the hall, and it’s kind of dark there but I can see, and the first door on my right is slightly ajar. It’s the bathroom door. And, across from me, at the base where the door joins the wall, there’s this little paper bag, like a lunch bag, with its top curled into a handle that way we do with those bags.
H: Listens
D: And I think, ok, that’s sort of weird… but I go to grab the door handle, to open the door… and, suddenly, shockingly, I am engaged in the most terrifying, other-worldly, bizarre kind of tug-of-war with some invisible, monstrous force… on the other side of the door.
D: It’s like the tactile push-and-pull of the tactile force-analog of something like lightning… even though it doesn’t seem to be directly associated with electricity…
H: Yes, I recognize this. This is familiar to me from my own experiences as well.
D: Oh, you know about this? From what do you know about that?
H: Yes. I’ve had similar experiences in dreams.
D: It’s ‘electrically terrifying’ somehow, and the feeling is like one is being yanked about by something in another dimension. And I’ve had a number of other similar encounters with this ‘force’ and it’s always very similar; jerky, kind of para-electrical, para-magnetic… and a couple of times that led me into full sleep-paralysis, total nonordinary experience, and so on.
H: Nods. Yes.
D: And of course, I associate these things with hypnapompia. And there’s a wide range of experiences that can happen in there. And some of them are terrifying and some of them definitely seem metaphysical. There’s almost no other way to think of them…
H: Yes, I agree.
D: I mean, there are forms of hypnapompic experience you can have, when you’re in this state, that there’s no way for you to have in any other state or aspect of your life. And one of the more peculiar possibilities… or foundations of these experiences is… often at least… the sense that not only are you somehow totally alone… in the sense of like … being the only person in the world…
H: Looks concerned, is thinking, checking, has an objection…
D: But you might be the only being in the entire universe…
H: Still appears to be objecting…
D: Except for… like… the monsters you sensed downstairs… or … the strange and shocking force that I usually encounter…
H: Yes, that’s it. Yes. When I had that dream, I always felt totally alone… except for…
D: Yes, yes. I remember a couple times, like once I woke up and was looking around my room. And I saw everything as it was, and I turned and saw my girlfriend sleeping next to me, and the curl of her hair on the pillow… and I was sort of bemused for a moment. And then I began to feel anxious, at first, and then frightened, and then I felt… this sense… of being absolutely alone not merely in my room, or the world… but in the universe.
And that really terrified me… and I think this … sense… this aspect of the experience is profoundly important. It’s something we should really pay attention to.
H: Yes, yes.
D: And it was at that moment that I somehow realized, ‘Oh, shit. My eyes aren’t open.’ And then… I opened them… and nothing changed. And I sat there in awe, realizing that, somehow, I had just accurately seen my room… without my eyes! And I remember that one of my first thoughts was, ‘Shit, I wonder if we could use this to teach blind people to see?’ And while I have many other questions about that situation, I still wonder that.
H: Oh yes, I see. Without your eyes!
D: Yes!
29:17–30.02 :H: Explains something(Recording damaged)
D: Yes, that’s very timely, because, ah, about 5 nights ago, I woke up, and was aware I had to be awake for work. I know I have like an hour and a half that I can lay there, and I do. And about a few minutes (or maybe even seconds) before I my alarm will go off, I suddenly find myself on the roof. Not in a scenario, mind you. Just me, on the roof of this building, seemingly kneeling. This is strange; normally, I am engaged in some kind … well, if I am having a dream, then there’s usually some kind of thing being done, or happening. It’s not really like that. More like… something unusual is happening to me. And I am on the roof above where I am sleeping, and I remember that…
Well, a few days previously, a friend of mine had posted a video on youtube, in which a man (on the right) was interviewing a South American man who taught things somewhat related to nagualism. And he was talking about the tonal and the nagual which might crudely be understood as traditions arising in pre-Columbian South American indigenous magical practices (or our modern ideas related to such a thing).
And he spoke of the importance of a specific action during dreaming, if one was aware, and could direct such action, which was to turn one’s perspective 180º so that, instead of looking out from your face to the world around you, the world around you would look toward (and into) you. And I was fascinated by this motivation.
Somehow, in that moment, I remembered this instruction, and tried as best I could to achieve it, but could not ‘do’ it.
So I then recalled the advice common to many lucid dreaming instructions … to ‘look at your hands’. This is something I have known about for some 30 years but never succeeded at. I immediately tried to look at my hands, primarily my left hand… and it was at first not very … well, it was ambiguous, visually! It wasn’t fully formed. But as I looked at it, it began to take on a more familiar appearance, become solid, and so on, and once I could see both of my hands clearly… my perspective leapt into the air and began flying (due North, if I recall). It wasn’t like I was aware I was dreaming, or desiring to fly — again, it’s just something that happened to me. It wasn’t even particularly exhilarating, though the perspectival sensations were extremely novel.
It was not like I had a body, either. Like my point of view was moving on its own. In fact, my sense of being myself was not present. What ended up happening is rather bizarre, and personal; it involved travel to a ‘red mansion’ and interactions with those who were inside.
Shortly after this I had another not dissimilar experience, that repeated the motif. Finding myself in a strange situation, looking for my hands… then, suddenly, flying without a body.
Note: For some reason, the recording stopped including the contributions of H around this point ]
[ End Transcript of a Conversation ]
So now we come to the central question of this conversation… what is the source of illumination in dreaming? Of course, many people have answers at the ready. It’s consciousness. Awareness. And so on. But this is not what I am asking, and those answers merely move the goalpost… they are the ineffectual results of the waking mind attempting to get a grasp on features of a mind it has very little to do with. Such answers are obvious, but resolve nothing (unless we are with a sage or wise person who can tell us much more, and speak to us about how to pursue the question in a profound way). I do not really want ‘an answer’. What I am after is a way to continue to pursue the question more meaningfully. And clearly this is a matter of intimacy with the question, the active (and perhaps communal) exploration of dreaming itself… our life history, and those we encounter who have something to show us about it.
It’s fascinating to me that hypnopompic (sleep to waking) experiences often include the specific sign of attempting to ‘turn the light on’ and having this fail. Part of me imagines, in the aftermath of my attempt to use my flashlight when the wall light wouldn’t work… that there’s some way to produce dreaming-light while we are awake. Is there something within our capacity to be human that would allow us to produce that same form of illumination… while awake?
For many years, I followed the stories woven by Carlos Castenada. I also tried to look very carefully for evidence that he was, effectively… lying. His stories are profoundly compelling, and it’s simply not clear to what degree they may be invented or confabulated. I read the books by his ‘students’, the witches, and I joined a group of people who were interested in the topic of nagualism. A gross over-simplication of the associated ideas is that we have a tonal which is our waking-world mind and experience, and a nagual, which is our dreaming world experience. By day the tonal is up around our heads, but at night these two aspects exchange dominance. A central idea is that our dreaming experience determines our waking-world experiences and life-paths, but we are trapped in the tonal, replaying patterns that spiral and are recapitulated during our waking lives until we discover and become capable of bringing the nagual to our experience of being awake. In these traditions, the meaning of dreaming is not like the meanings we generally associate with it. So, too, the meaning of lucidity.
I have often wondered… or rather it is a question I have chased and quested with… what would it mean to be lucidly awake? The awareness of dreaming in dreaming produces a vast spectrum of possibilities and experiences… and part of the reason it is difficult for some to achieve is that the ‘two powers’ are usually opposed. Introduction of rational, waking-mind styles of consciousness, judgement (including the determination of identity) are, in a sense ‘sharp’ to the dreaming mind’s peculiar capacities to invent universes while we are asleep. It is as if the dreaming mind produces something resembling bubbles and as these collect together, the experience of a world emerges from their interrelation. I usually refer to the dreaming mind’s creations as dreaming manifolds. If the waking mind enters more or less directly, this collapses the manifold, and we ‘wake up’.
There are signs that indicate this forceful intrusion, and some of them are related to the synchronization or desynchronization of various ‘threads’ of the processes involved in the production and maintenance of the dreaming manifold. It turns out that there are a vast number of features of consciousness, awareness… and biology… that must unify and harmonize, in a sense, to create and maintain the experience we call dreaming. This is a similar situation in waking awareness — desychronization in waking consciousness produces delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, depression, etc.. The features that attend and adjust harmonization of the various ‘organs’ of consciousness, and their rhythms, determine the modes and forms of consciousness and dreaming available to us.
Although we can learn to intentionally modulate the principals that orient and inform our dreaming awareness and experience… it should be obvious that the same skills we can learn to apply there… are profoundly applicable to our waking-world experience. In dreams, we can creatively experiment without lethal consequence. And the dimensionality that is available in dreams surpasses most of what we will commonly experience while awake. In dreaming, identity itself includes nonordinary domains of intimacy, resemblance, desire, emotion… bonding… and kinship. Thus it is that dreams can restore or re-enrich our waking would perspectives. Consider the difference between having only one’s habitual perspectives… and having the ability to use more than one at a time, or rapidly exchange them for others that are more useful… or profound… or meaningful.
This is but a tributary of the rarely acknowledged powers of our dreaming aspect. The ‘one who is awake’ when our waking self is sleeping.
Once I dreamed that I was sitting in an open area within something like a vast manor house’s land or garden. It was night, and I was sitting on a wooden bench across from an older woman who was alluring. I looked beyond her, up into the night sky, and saw a starfield. As I ‘focused’ upon one area, it began to warble — the stars seemed to jiggle and move about in little circular patterns.
I turned to the woman and asked her: ‘Did you see that?’ She just gazed at me with a beautiful and enigmatic smile. And I felt she had fully answered the question in a way that obliterated it completely.
I will suggest that, from at least one extremely useful perspective, granting as well that each person’s dream life is as unique as it is indicative of the nature of dreaming in general, dreaming is fundamentally heroic. Far be it from me to attempt to explain in brief text matters more appropriate to small-group, highly focused exploration… but our dreaming does not have its origins in us. It is a primordially communal activity, and it arises within and always draws deeply upon relationships familiar to us. It commonly invents families on the fly and places us in direct cooperative or oppositional relation to them. But that’s for psychologists to decode. What I am concerned with here is something far beyond the ordinary ideas about psyche. In this case, the mythic sense is far more apt than the psychological one, but let’s keep both…
For the dreaming mind, each dream is the universe, and the mission is profoundly heroic… rescue it from that which destroys the dreaming…
If the world, with all of its historical beings, mountains and skies, lakes and oceans, forests, jungles, deserts and myriad insects, plants and animals… we to pour forth its entire memory into a single vessel, there to be celebrated… or destroyed, that vessel is, at least for the past few hundred thousand years… humans. The networks of dreaming on Earth are unimaginable to ordinary persons who have never had an interest in or reason to consider them. But to those who dream, and are aware of the Other World we visit every night if our lives…
The moderns are blind… and severely handicapped.
One might say ‘they have confused their boat for the ocean, and have never imagined the sea’.
It will rarely occur to us that our dreaming might be attempting to solve problems that we feel helpless to address. Problems in the world, societies, histories, our neighborhoods… our families and friends. But I suggest that they do. Lest this be dismissed as ‘woo’ or ‘metaphysical nonsense’, allow me to remind those who take issue that, without dreaming, animals die. Quickly. All you need to do to kill up a batch of mice in a few days is insure they are denied the opportunity to dream. Their bodies can no longer maintain homeostasis. They die, apparently, from the sudden inability to maintain a stable body temperature. This relatively insipid article hints in the directions that are relevant. Dreaming, it turns out, is fundamental to the organization and linking of a vast array of forms of memory. In case you’re inclined to say ‘so what’, your capacity to do so is founded in nothing else. Memory, it turns out, is the root of all possibility. Evict that?
You got nothing to be, say, do, feel, think… or object with.
I suggest that our dreams partake of the entire system of life on Earth… all of its histories… and all of it’s possible futures. And the dreaming mind, is trying, while doing seven other things and processing links between memory elements…
to save everyone… everywhere.
Forever.
Because, fundamentally? This is the actual mission we come to birth to … contribute to. Personally. Even if we become confused… or actively reject it.
I have not forgotten, not yet at least, the organizing principle of this exploration. What is the source of illumination in dreaming? But there are different kinds of light. All of our myths, religions, and bizarre narratives about Origin and Divinity orbit a very similar question. What if the source of light in dreaming relates to Origin… or even… liberation?
In such a situation the light that we experience in dreaming is, effectively, Origin. And as such, presents us with a compass of sorts. The light in dreams does not merely illuminate, but even this is true of waking mind ‘light’. Because while awake, though we rarely consider it, light… the stuff that allows our visual dominance in cognition to become useful or awake… the sunlight on our skin that literally wakes us from dreaming…
… is the primary determinant of identity.
What or who, things, beings or collections of them…
are.
And this is the foundation of consciousness itself.
By day, the sun and machines make the forms of light by which we evaluate not merely our circumstances, but somehow, in our imaginations … ourselves. Our world. Our history, our future… our identity.
Try, if you are so inclined, to imagine heroism without light or identity.
I once spoke to an indigenous medicine person. I asked them what they would say to those of us moderns who are so confused about dreaming that we think of it as trivial. They answered in an indigenous language that is nothing like English. But I can crudely attempt to translate the English version into something that at least resembles their urgent attempt to ‘wake us up’ in the sense of ‘failing to be blinded by what we usually think’. Their goal was to return wings to our direct experience that are effectively severed by our ideas about Nature, reality… and dreaming.
“Your people have this thing they call the Internet. It’s made of wires and machines, which are dead inside. We have something older. Far older. The networks we participate in are the original networks. They don’t need wires or electricity. And they reach far beyond this planet. Into the family of living worlds everywhere. In all of time.
You could say these are ‘the forests, the jungle, the desert’. The beings that live in and as the forests and jungles, the lakes, the rivers — even the desert.. the oceans. These are not just the connectors… the ‘hubs’ to your people… they are the origin of the purpose of the network. And it doesn’t serve corporations or religions or governments. It serves life itself. And Origin.
When we dream the forests and creatures… the entire history of life on Earth… is dreaming us. And we are dreaming for the possibility of rescue. We are dreaming for the entire history and future of life on Earth. To try to find the medicine that will wrest the humans from their lethal nightmare of control of Nature. We are dreaming for you. Your children. Your ancestors. For the mountain and the Morning Star. We are dreaming for the ancient network of living worlds. For the Sun, for the Moon. And we are doing this on purpose. Not for recognition or fame, or any representation of value or skill.
We are doing this because the Earth is doing this. There’s a purposive orientation here. And we not only trust it… we become it, together, forever.
Our dreaming is our life. It shows us what is happening … everywhere, but especially near our homes, in the jungle, and if people from outside are coming… as well as why they are coming. Without our dreaming abilities, we would be blind, deaf and confused… because we would have only a fraction of the awareness and insight that are common to us. Your people have lost the dreaming skills, and, to us, it is a crippling and inexplicable loss…
But under certain circumstances… our people can rescue yours…”
Let us return to the strange situations that arise in hypnogogic and hypnopompic experience. Because these two domains of nonordinary experience are accessible to many if not most of us, and they harbor strange clues as to the actual nature of the transition between ‘being awake’ and ‘dreaming’. They are the twilight realms, the intervals across which we must travel to encounter or sustain anything resembling the deceptively ‘stable’ states of waking and dreaming.
In these ‘twilight’ domains, our consciousness is interacting with itself in a far less structured way than is ordinarily the case. And what we are experiencing, when we feel the sounds or even smell the colors… is the result of various faculties that organize awareness… interfering with each other until they begin to harmonize together, again.
In almost every instance, this feels a lot like an encounter with Death. We are helpless, often disembodied, and are at the mercy of forces we have no common concepts for. Coherent experience from the perspective of myself, may disappear entirely. Chaos reigns … or bizarre coherences so unfamiliar as to seem alien if not evil. But this is the very marrow of the bones of our dreaming aspect.
The dreaming mind is at ease even with this, because it knows the secrets… of transformation over time. It is preternaturally aware that the strange little apocalypses common to dreaming experience (waking up is almost always the end of the world for the dreaming self, exceptions being those who can sustain certain features of it into waking awareness and activity. Art, for example).
Our waking mind may panic at the powerful pulses that sound like angels or demons and display bizarre, para-geometric patterns, thunder, voices, or choirs… but the dreaming self is totally familiar with these transitions.
Yet the panic, in the waking aspect, is real. Without a deep curiosity, training, or luck… we will presume that the inchoate manifestations of the between are actually malignant… or at least… should be resisted at all costs.
And that’s natural, in a sense. It’s what we refer to in English as the survival instinct. But in dreaming, there’s something even better than mere survival.
Insight.
In a few days, I will interview someone whose mind is very advanced. I know a few such people. When I consider what questions I may pose, one comes (at the moment) to the fore. Suppose this is your last statement that you can make to humanity. What will you say?
This is the situation the dreaming mind often concerns itself with, for a simple ‘reason’. When you awaken, the world will end. Every awakening is, effectively ‘the end of the world’ for the dreaming aspect. Because while dreaming… the ‘world’ is the dream. The dreaming mind and the dream are in unity, so the dream is the self. While we may perceive ourselves as the central character in the dream, what is actually going on is far more profound, because our dreaming aspect identifies not only with the central perspective, but the entire context, situation, plot… and circumstances.
There are faculties that manage the transition … from waking to sleep, and from dreaming… to waking. One of these faculties, though it’s not actually as distinct as the language makes it sound, is concerned with putting the entire dreaming cycle of this specific sleep experience… to an end.
It is the one who ends the dreaming.
There are many mythical images of such an entity, if it is an entity at all, and… under ordinary circumstances it never becomes quite that explicit. Its activities are, ordinarily, relatively subtle. Because it usually doesn’t take much to end the dreaming cycle. A question. An assertion of specific identity. A conflict. Physical danger. There’s a vast library of features it can introduce to the dream that will collapse the manifold to its intersections. So, most of the time, it doesn’t have to explicitly appear in the dreamer’s experience. But under situations of desynchronization of the various aspects of the dreaming manifold, it may appear explicitly. The most common instance of this is the terrifying ‘bad man’ at the end of the bed, upon one’s stomach, at a window or doorway.
Millions of people have experienced this. They awaken with a sense of an interloper nearby. Almost invariably this is felt as a fundamental violation of their being. The ‘intruder’ is often all black, pure shadow, tall, hat-wearing, and represents ‘that which should not be here, ever’.
Some of them will have sleep paralysis as well. Others will simply be waking up in the room in which they were previously dreaming. Others will experience false awakenings in which they think they are waking up in the room in which they went to sleep … even though they are actually still asleep.
Is the bad man an actual entity? A demon? An incubus? This matter is not easily settled in such general or hypothetical terms. However, the if we are actually experiencing such intrusions, then we may experiment in an effort to better understand, and perhaps cope with, such seeming intrusions. I have spoken at length about this topic in my videos, in which I address the peculiar situation that arises during sleep desynchronization, and how I found a path through the nightmare… to something resembling its origins.
May it suffice to say that the faculties involved are neither demonic, nor evil; rather, they are out of place. The being that appears has a profoundly important responsibility, in a sense, and by the time it is showing up explicitly, something has gone deeply amiss in the structure of the dreaming manifold.
In my own dreaming experience… the experience of a lifetime of dreams and nonordinary experiences… I have encountered prodigies and riddles… conundrums … that formed hints of the map. This is a topic rarely encountered among common dreamers. Yet, akin to the waking world, there is, it turns out, a kind of geography of the dreaming worlds. Something that links them all together. Over time, I have come to understand some features of the strangely transentient universe of dreaming. It is beyond ordinary conception, almost entirely. This should not be surprising, because ordinary conception lacks the intrinsic dimensionality that is native and natural to the dreaming mind. Art is one of the intersections between the waking mind and dreaming. It is one of the twilight places where the two worlds can meet without one overwhelming the other. Song, dance, painting, acting, and, at least in poetry, writing. The conceptual world is the death of the dreaming mind. Its what the dream dies into. Would that we could, together, recognize, remind each other, and remember… that the very origins of the minds with which we are trained to dismiss dreaming… is in the dreams we thus dismiss, with a wave of the hand of abstract conception.
I’d be grateful to my readers if they would answer the following questions in comments:
1. Have you ever seen the Sun in a dream?
2. Have you ever seen the Moon in a dream?
3. Have you ever seen a lit lamp or lightbulb in a dream?
3a: Have you ever attempted to ‘turn on a light’ in a dream, and succeeded?
3b. Have you ever attempted to ‘turn on a light’ in a dream, and failed? If so, what happened after that?
4. Have you ever seen a lit candle in a dream?
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and nearly everything else. I hope my work may contribute to our ability to assemble the authentic sources of what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of. Together. With and for each other and our world.
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( My writing is a gift that I hope may inspire speculation, wonder, discovery and new relationships. If you enjoy it, kindly take a moment to share it, connect with me personally, comment, correct me, or tap the Recommend button ⇩ ☺ )
